Frightened Salvador Peasants Caught in Siege

For three weeks, the peasants had been living in dark caves, hiding from what they called “the invasion” of army troops and air force bombers trying to retake the mammoth Guazapa volcano from armed guerrillas.

Now, unable to withstand their hunger any longer, the peasants crawled out of their holes and waited to be discovered by soldiers, who they believed would kill them for being supporters of the leftist rebels.

When the soldiers finally found the men and women with sunken cheeks, the children with matted hair and bat bites, they turned them over to a lieutenant at an abandoned ranch. However, the 25-year-old lieutenant did not harm them. Instead, he wrote their names in a spiral notebook and made light of their years of accumulated terror.

“They (the guerrillas) told you we’d kill you, didn’t they?” Lt. Armando Angora said, half-teasing, half-bullying the peasants. “We’re not going to kill you. We’re going to get you food and medicine and take you out of here.”

Operation Phoenix

Angora’s men rounded up 120 peasants last Sunday, bringing to more than 400 the number of civilians removed from Guazapa during the army’s counterinsurgency Operation Phoenix. The operation--which bears the same name as one used by U.S. forces in the Vietnam War--is the Salvadoran government’s most extensive effort so far to gain control of a guerrilla stronghold 15 miles north of the capital.

It seeks to force the guerrillas’ civilian supporters from the rugged land, and ultimately, to resettle the area with peasants loyal to the administration headed by President Jose Napoleon Duarte.

Operation Phoenix, which includes 2,500 soldiers from three specially trained battalions and two regular battalions, supported by armed helicopters and assault jets, began Jan. 10 with repeated early morning explosions of 500- and 750-pound bombs in areas inhabited by peasants.

Gen. Adolfo O. Blandon, chief of the armed forces, said the operation would continue for two weeks and that one battalion would then be left in the area permanently.

In at least a dozen previous military operations, the army has pushed the rebels out of Guazapa into the northern province of Chalatenango, or east to San Vicente. But the rebels have always returned when the operations ended or when they could draw the army out of Guazapa with attacks in other provinces.

‘At Heart of Enemy’

The huge volcano and its surrounding lowlands are symbolic, as they are strategic. Even before guerrilla warfare on a sustained scale broke out in this country six years ago, the guerrillas--since grouped as the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front--had established a foothold in an area of about 45 square miles on the slopes of Guazapa. They called the mountain “the tip of the spear pointing at the heart of the enemy” in San Salvador.

The mountain provides the guerrillas easy access to the capital, where they have promised to increase attacks, and a corridor from the north to the east.

At their peak strength there, the guerrillas are estimated to have had about 10,000 supporters--with their own schools, hospitals, farming and fishing cooperatives, and even local elections.

Over the years, the rebels’ civilian supporters have been pushed out of the area by successive ground and air assaults. Army and church officials estimate that about 1,500 civilians remained in the area when Operation Phoenix began.

“The object of this operation is to get rid of the impression in the world that Guazapa belongs to the terrorists,” said Col. Leopoldo Hernandez, commander of the 1st Brigade and of the operation. “The object is to reactivate the zone, and to get out the masses and show them who we really are and that they have been tricked.”

Shortly after the operation began, Msgr. Gregorio Rosa Chavez, auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, announced in a homily that he had unconfirmed reports that about 1,000 civilians were surrounded by two battalions in the hamlets of Las Delicias and Platanares.

800 Peasants Remaining

The actual number of people involved is unknown. Human rights workers estimate that there may be about 800 of the original 1,500 left in the area. Soldiers, who speak of “capturing” peasants, say others may have escaped north.

Most of the 120 civilians rounded up last Sunday said they were from the hamlets of Platanares and Las Delicias. They said the areas where they lived had been repeatedly bombed in the last three weeks, a continuation of aerial attacks that began three years ago. The peasants said they protected themselves from the troops, helicopter fire and bombings by hiding in the cave shelters, known as tatus.

They said they knew of no civilian deaths caused by the bombings in this operation. Human rights workers said they did not yet know if civilians had been killed and did not have figures on civilian wounded.

“Tuesday is the last time we were bombed,” said Eliseo Escobar, 45, of Platanares. He said his family had been subsisting underground on cornmeal and sugar. Others said they had been living on yucca or sesame seeds.

“We couldn’t take the hunger anymore. We decided to come out and that if they found us, we would go and if they didn’t find us, we would stay. We were afraid. It’s only since last year that they (the army) started treating people at all well,” Escobar said.

“We haven’t been home for 22 days,” said Norberto Casco, 44, the father of six. “The invasions used to last only about eight days. We finally decided that, live or die, we were going to leave.”

Some soldiers on Guazapa told other reporters that in one case they had drawn the peasants out of a cave by threatening to fire a mortar.

Adequate Intelligence

Hernandez insisted that the army has military intelligence to locate masses of people and that, “generally, where there are bombings, there aren’t any masses.”

Blandon confirmed there had been bombings in the areas of Salitre, Los Lirios and La Cruz on the south, where he said there were concentrations of at least 100 guerrillas at the time. He said he believed there had been bombings in the areas of Consolacion, La Caja, Las Delicias and Platanares to the north.

When asked about the civilians living in the area, he said, “The civilians who accompany the terrorists are collaborators,” implying that they were fair military targets. “The others take refuge in tatus and are protected from the bombing.”

President Duarte’s rules of engagement, issued in 1984, prohibit air force attacks on areas where civilians may be hurt.

Military officials say they believe that 500 to 800 guerrillas were on the volcano when Operation Phoenix began. Officials said that this time they were going to prevent the guerrillas from escaping, but soldiers in the lowlands said they had not seen combat in at least four days, and they believed many of the rebels were gone.

Hernandez said that 50 guerrillas were killed and 50 more wounded. The guerrillas said they killed or wounded 153 soldiers, most of them with mines, but Hernandez said that only two of his troops were killed and 44 wounded. None of the figures could be independently confirmed.

Building Road

Part of Operation Phoenix is an army effort to open a 10-mile road with bulldozers through the lowlands linking the towns of Aguilares and Suchitoto, an area overgrown with vegetation that has been controlled by guerrillas for about five years. The zone, surrounded by abandoned sugar cane fields, then is to be repopulated and cultivated.

“The idea is to reopen the road so the owners can move back and plant and give work to the masses,” Hernandez said.

Observers of the six-year war said the military success of the operation will be measurable in three or four months, if the government’s troops maintain control of the road and the volcano. It may take longer to determine whether they have scored a political success.

Army officers admit that they must win the hearts of the peasants who have lived with, supported and protected the guerrillas for years under army fire, but they are not specific about how they plan to do that.

History of Repression

The peasants’ fears of the military are based on years of repression and killings. When Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas of San Salvador visited Guazapa in October to negotiate with guerrillas for the release of Duarte’s kidnaped daughter, the peasants gave him a letter listing a series of massacres they said occurred from 1980 to 1983, with 444 deaths. The letter also said that 200 civilians, in some instances including entire families, had disappeared or been killed in the last two years.

Blandon disputed characterizations of troop violence or callousness. “The image these people have of us changes when they have contact with our troops and are well received,” he said in an interview.

“That is the first impression that is in our favor. Then we explain the democratic process and the advances we have had in the social sector--the efforts the government has made to rectify economic inequalities.”

Social workers from the army’s psychological operations unit lecture the peasants when they come out of Guazapa, but then they are turned over to their families or to church-run refugee camps.

“I am sure they will return, but with a new mentality,” Blandon said.

Rations and Conversation

The soldiers in Guazapa handed the peasants cigarettes and food from their ration bags--sugar, rolls, canned tamales and flip-top cans of Chef Boyardee lasagna--that the people ate ravenously. The soldiers picked up the babies and chatted with the young women. They teased and joked and asked for information about other civilians in the area--and about the guerrillas.

The men and women insisted that they did not support the guerrillas, that the guerrillas only passed through their hamlets occasionally and had not done so for a long time. But when one soldier asked an 18-year-old where the father of her 2-month-old baby was, she looked silently at her feet. There were no men of fighting age, between 15 and 35, in the group.

The peasants were held under guard at the farm for the night before being transported to an army outpost at the San Francisco sugar refinery, where they would be given talks and questioned for a couple of days until moved to refugee camps or families.

At night, as the peasants made their beds of sheets of plastic, soldiers on patrol blackened their faces with soot to search for guerrillas.

Another soldier who would stay behind warned the peasants not to wander off in the dark, saying the rebels could attack the ranch.

“It’s for your own security,” the soldier said. “Bullets could fly, and a bullet knows no friends and no enemies.”